Organizations often have multiple systems that store and process the same or similar data. However, this is expensive for organizations in terms of maintaining the disparate systems, and there may be data synchronization issues, such as using an outdated customer address in one system even though the current address is persisted in a different system. Additionally, an organization may be forced to spend money on hardware that is not required due to the proliferation of duplicate data.
In most organizations, users' desktop and mobile computing environments often contain multiple files containing the same or similar data with different names. Having this data duplication is sometimes intentional to preserve data lineage, such as in compliance situations, but is also accidental in some cases. Using resources to store unneeded data often results in incurring costs to replace or augment a user's computing environment before the serviceable life of the computing environment is met.
Many organizations provide enterprise storage systems for their users to manage documents that have enterprise value. Some examples of these enterprise systems include shared file systems, document management systems, content management systems, mobile drop box access, and others. Multiple users often contribute the same or similar documents to be persisted on their behalf in these enterprise systems. This results in increased storage requirements for storing the same or similar data.
Also, large organizations often lack the ability to discover collaborative opportunities that exist outside defined processes.